Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

Politics is the art of the possible.

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.